Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée (French: [meʁime]; 28 September 1803 – 23 September 1870) was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, and one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, and translated the work of several important Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, and was responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, and arranged for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.

He lived with his mother and father in Paris until the death of his father in September 1837. From 1838 he shared an apartment with his mother on the Left Bank at 10 rue des Beaux-Arts, in the same building as the offices of the Revue des deux Mondes. They moved to a house at 18 rue Jacob in 1847 until his mother died in 1852.Mérimée never married, but he needed female company. He had a series of romantic affairs, sometimes carried out by correspondence. In January 1828, during his youth, he was wounded in duel with the husband of his mistress at the time, Émilie Lacoste. In 1831 he began a relationship by correspondence with Jenny Dacquin. Their relationship continued for ten years, but they only met six or seven times, and then rarely alone. In 1873, after his death, she published all of his letters under the title Lettres a une inconnue, or "Letters to an Unknown", in several volumes.In his youth he had a mistress in Paris, Céline Cayot, an actress whom he supported financially and paid for an apartment. He then had a longer and more serious relationship with Valentine Delessert. Born in 1806, she was the daughter of Count Alexandre de Laborde, aide-de-camp to King Louis Philippe, and she was married to Gabriel Delessert, a prominent banker and real estate developer, who was twenty years older. Mérimée met Delessert in 1830, and she became his mistress in 1836, when he was visiting Chartres, where her husband had been named Prefect. he wrote to Stendhal that "She is my grand passion; I am deeply and seriously in love". Her husband, who had become prefect of police in Paris, apparently ignored the relationship. However, by 1846, the relationship had cooled, and while he was on one of his long tours, she became the mistress of another writer, Charles de Rémusat. His correspondence shows he was desolate when Delessert abandoned him for younger writers Rémusat and then, in 1854, for Maxime Du Camp. One consolation for Mérimée in his last years was a reconciliation with Delessert in 1866.In 1833 he had a brief romantic liaison with the writer George Sand, which ended unhappily. After they spent a night together, they separated without warmth. She told a friend, the actress Marie Darval, "I had Mérimèe last night, and it wasn't much". Darval promptly told her friend Alexandre Dumas, who then told all of his friends. Mérimée promptly counter-attacked, calling her "a woman debauched and cold, by curiosity more than by temperament". They continued to collaborate on common goals. They both played a part in 1834 in the discovery and preservation of The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries; he declared the tapestries were of historic value, and she publicized them in one of her novels. In 1849 he assisted her when she asked that the paintings in the church of Nohant, where she lived, be classified, which he did. He also provided a subsidy of 600 francs to the church. However, she deeply offended him by openly ridiculing the Empress Eugénie. At their last meeting in 1866, he found her hostile. She came to visit him a few days before his death, but he refused to see her.When he traveled on his inspection trips around France, he often sought the company of prostitutes. He was often cynical about his relationships, writing, "There are two kinds of women; those who are worth the sacrifice of your life, and those who are worth between five and forty francs. Many years later he wrote to Jenny Dacquin, "It is a fact that at one time of my life I frequented bad society, but I was attracted to it through curiosity only, and I was there as a stranger in a strange country. As for good society, I found it often enough deadly tiresome."He had a very close friendship with Stendhal, who was twenty years older, when they were both aspiring writers, but the friendship later became strained as Mérimée's literary success exceeded that of Stendhal. They traveled together to Rome and Naples in November 1837, but in his correspondence Stendhal complained of the vanity of Mérimée and called him "his Pedantry, Mister Academus". The early death of Stendhal in Paris on 23 March 1842, shocked Mérimée. He offered his correspondence from Stendhal to the Revue des deux Mondes, but the editor refused them as not worthy of attention. In 1850, eight years after the death of Stendhal, Mérimée wrote a brief brochure of sixteen pages describing the romantic adventures that he and Stendhal had had together in Paris, leaving most of the names blank. Only twenty-five copies were made, and distributed to friends of Stendhal. The brochure caused a scandal; Mérimée was denounced as an "atheist" and "blasphemer" by friends of Stendhal for suggesting that Stendhal had ever behaved improperly. He responded that he simply wanted to show that Stendhal was a genius but not a saint.The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire compared the personality of Mérimée with that of the painter Eugène Delacroix, both men suddenly thrust into celebrity in the artistic and literary world of Paris. He wrote that they both shared "the same apparent coldness, lightly affected, the same mantle of ice covering a shy sensibility, an ardent passion for the good and the beautiful, the same hypocrisy of egoism, the same devotion to secret friends and to the ideas of perfection".Politically, Mérimée was a liberal in the style of the Doctrinaires, welcomed the July Monarchy, and maintained an affection for Adolphe Thiers and Victor Cousin, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence. After the uprisings of 1848, he opted for the stability offered by Emperor Napoleon III, which earned him the ire of the republican opposition such as Victor Hugo. Despite his close relations with the Emperor, Mérimée remained a committed Voltairean and opposed to both "papists" and legitimists (ultra-royalists). He likewise became more critical of both the domestic and foreign policies of the Empire after 1859, and opposed the military adventures in Mexico.